In early August he died alone in a basement apartment on Blessington Street, in Dublin’s north inner city. A separated father-of-two, his body lay undiscovered for two weeks as other tenants in the apartment block, many of them immigrants, went to and fro, oblivious to his death.
All that marks his existence now is a skip on Blessington Street filled with his belongings. Pedestrians sometimes stop to check if there is anything worth taking. There isn’t.
McMahon is one of the growing number who die alone and then lie undiscovered for weeks. Because of soaring house prices, more people live in one-bedroom apartments, some of the estimated 300,000 living alone in Ireland.
McMahon, 6ft tall and stocky, was a bodybuilder and worked as a security guard. Nobody must have called on him for those two weeks. By the time gardai were notified on August 20 about the strange smell emanating from the basement, his body was badly decomposed. Two gardai at the scene got sick from the stench.
When the fire brigade had placed as much of the remains as possible into a body bag and taken them to the Mater, gardai identified McMahon and tracked down his relatives. His former girlfriend, who lives in Clondalkin with their two daughters, was contacted. After that they gave the landlord a telephone number for Paul Mooney.
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He arrived later that day in a white van, marked Crime Scene Cleaners, with an array of chemicals for cleaning up bodily fluids and a steaming machine that kills all micro-organisms at a heat of 175C. Unless they saw Mooney in his full-length white forensic clothing, with a twin-filter breathing apparatus over his head, neighbours would have had no idea what awaited him inside.
“If you die on a bed and you’re left for a week your body swells up and bursts. Everything leaks,” Mooney explains. “Everything is destroyed with maggots. They multiply and multiply. By the time you’re dead for a week, there are hundreds of thousands of them, millions. It’s like looking at a bed of rice.
“Everything has to go in a case like that, the carpet, everything. We put in special machinery overnight to kill all the micro- organisms in the air. This stuff stays suspended in the atmosphere. You walk into it and it sticks to you. The smell is unreal. It gets everywhere. You go home and you shower and shower, because you can still smell it.”
Sometimes, with a putrefying corpse, intestinal hydrochloric acids have leaked and eaten their way through floorboards. Bluebottles have transported deadly microbiological organisms around the property. It’s not just a matter of spraying Dettol everywhere.
People at the scene can become infected by touching infected areas, breathing in contaminated air, or allowing contaminants into their bloodstream through the underside of fingernails or shaving cuts. Mooney and his team wear biohazard suits, gloves and masks. “After each job, everything, including the safety outfits, are incinerated to ensure biohazards have been totally disposed of,” he says.
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Mooney’s conversation is peppered with the uncomfortable minutiae of death — “bits of brain is the worst, it’s like glue” or “Aids stays active in dried blood for 72 days”. Most of us, his wife and three daughters included, would rather not know the detail. “My wife doesn’t mind certain aspects of it. She does some of the invoices. But she doesn’t know everything we see on the job and I don’t see any point in telling her.”
Mooney turned 40 last week and celebrated with a holiday in Spain. He says being surrounded by death and grime doesn’t keep him awake at night, but after dealing with 27 undiscovered dead bodies in the past three years, it may have aged him. He looks 10 years older than his age.
He never gets personal in his work. “The man in that case (McMahon) died from a heart attack. I don’t know his name. You don’t need to ask those questions and you don’t want to.”
Mooney set up Crime Scene Cleaners in 2003 and the progress of his company seems, perversely, to measure the decline of community in Ireland. CSC is about to issue its 1,000th invoice. With the average three-day job costing €1,000 plus expenses, there’s a lucrative business in death.
His first case was a woman in her forties who lived in a mid-terrace three-bedroom apartment in south Dublin. She was dead for six weeks before anyone noticed.
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A former morgue attendant at Blanchardstown Hospital, he set up the business after seeing a documentary on the Discovery Channel. He was also moved by witnessing the plight of families in the morgue in Blanchardstown.
“My job should have been built into victim support years ago. Imagine going home and finding your wife dead. The gardai do their job and then give you the keys and say: ‘There you go, you deal with it.’ You shouldn’t have to deal with that alone.”
Each job requires three staff, and he employs seven. He also cleans up after murders (he’s done three this year and only gets called if someone is killed in a house), suicides, break-ins (some robbers leave a calling card of excrement on the walls), and cleaning up houses ruined by heroin junkies.
Bertie Ahern once professed himself a fan of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, the definitive study of the breakdown of American community and the increasing isolation of modern-day living. The taoiseach has tried to counteract this trend towards single, apartment living by encouraging people to volunteer for local community activities.
Pat Lane of Reach Out Be a Good Neighbour, a group set up in 1992 after an elderly man’s body went undiscovered for four years, says apartment living is leading to the breakdown of community. “There should be a social component to the granting of planning permission,” he believes. “There is such turnover in apartments that suddenly you get the situation where someone is dead for weeks and nobody knows it.”
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For now, cases like John McMahon’s are on the increase. And for Paul Mooney, that means business is booming.